If Eric Trump tried to write an anonymous op-ed, it would have his name in the byline and the body of text would be blank.
Without doing any further research than that one article, my takeaway is that there was a point in time when the source was an intern, and some materials were from that time in his career, but that at the point in time at which the article was written, the source was not an intern and was appropriately described, and nearly all of the material that was used in relation to him was not from when he was an intern. That’s not a case of them lying about the identity of the person, that seems to be a case of them failing to note that in one instance, they were discussing the “early years” of that person’s career. That would be misleading, but could just as well be an oversight as an intentional act to deceive.
Really, if there was any fishy business going on at NYT, someone would leak it to a different news agency, because it would be going against acceptable journalistic standards for that business and all of the employees would be opposed to that. As your link suggests, any sort of questionable handling within the newspaper will be raised in the media and reported on, because it harms their industry, and so it was.
I’m thinking it’s fake.
And made up, by one of the many, many people Trump fired.
The use of “lodestar” was intended to sow discord, to put the cat in with the canaries, so to speak.
Who knows? Could be a copy boy or girl who happens to be in the right room. 
I will say it is DEFINITELY NOT Pence. I didn’t see “God” or “Jesus” or “blessed” in the text, so no way it’s him. He can’t speak a sentence without using those words.
You’ve either misread or misunderstood that one article.
All the quotes from that guy were from the “early years” of the guy’s career. The guy was “a 2009 college physics-engineering graduate who E.I.A. said was hired as an intern in summer 2009 and upgraded to general engineer in March 2011”. The emails “captured conversations between summer 2009 and April 2011”. The article was written on June 27, 2011.
No one who reads an article in the NYT with quotes from “one official”, an “energy analyst”, or “one federal analyst” would assume this was referring to a guy who was a year and a half out of college (and had apparently been promoted from intern status within the last month), even leaving aside the actual intern quote.
I came to this thread thinking it was Pence, but now I can see the argument for Conway. Gawd that would be great!
Deep down, I feel it could be no one at all. The NYT is no friend of Deej, and running this piece is having what could be considered the designed effect of causing chaos and suspicion and the undermining of trust in the WH. Trump values loyalty and trust above all else. With chaos reigning it will be harder to continue along his disastrous agenda.
Still, unless some law has been broken (with evidence) or Congress gets in the mood to impeach, this week will end the same as all the others - being called “Trump’s worst week ever”. There seems to be no bottom.
I am thinking George Conway by way of Kellyanne. It’s been rumored that she says she “needs a shower” every time she has to defend The Donald. Do I believe she actually said that? I don’t know. I give it about a 51/49 percentage-wise.
From Article II of the US Constitution:
Can’t be Conway unless it was ghostwritten. Far too coherent.
Is SNL running a new episode this week? Or Bill Maher’s show? I’d love to see what either one will do about this. Especially SNL. Bring on Baldwin!!
SNL starts a new season in a few weeks but Maher should be back tomorrow night.
I am starting to wonder, as others have, if it’s some kind of inside job put out to get die hard Trumpsters in a tizzy and to validate Trump’s claims of a “Deep State”. The sticking point of that theory for me is that I don’t think 2 Scoops has it in him to put out something that makes him look so pathetic. His ego couldn’t stand it. Maybe it was done for his benefit but without his knowledge.
I’m also wondering if whoever wrote it was trying to get Cheeto to stroke out.
OK, i’m going with Coats.
First off, if that story about him ordering a hit on Assad is true, that’s literally I don’t even. That he might do so and forget that he did…paint my butt blue and move to the country. Its just another chunk of news, like a box of chocolates, cockroach cluster, lark’s vomit…
“Unsung heroes” really gets me. We’re out here saving you from foreign threats and the loony left and your own President! If this is not a career politician with higher ambitions appealing to the old base, then I don’t see the point of it at all.
But the base is not listening to anyone without the Trump surname, so even that point makes little sense.
I wouldn’t be surprised, in part because I think (with precisely no evidence, mind you) that Trump tried to fuck her at some point. But I suspect Dan Coats is the most likely choice. Neither one explains the “lodestar” thing, though.
I don’t think the letter was written to comfort the people that there are “adults on watch”, it was written to strike paranoia into Trump’s head. Making it seem like the VP is out there rallying the rest of the cabinet to start considering the 25th Amendment seems like a pretty sure-fire way to accomplish that. I would imagine the goal, then, being to make him implode.
That said, one thing that I’ve been impressed with Trump on is that - whatever he does in private - he’s pretty good at keeping his cool in the public eye. It’s hard to get a gauge on how much any one piece of news really hits him. I keep hoping for clear insanity to find its way into his tweets, but so far he’s still keeping strong. That’s probably the only thing keeping his approval rating up.
The man has decades of practice, of course. He’s almost certainly been in extreme debt and living a lie since the 80s, only steps away from being outed as a failure and going to jail for the rest of his life.
He had people threatening the wife and kids of a creditor back in 2009, he was so scared out of his mind at the impact of the $1.25b debt that the Trump Organization owed, and yet he appears completely calm on the camera, with David Letterman, at the same time that call was being made, claiming that he had no debts and that it was only a bunch of other suckers who had lost it all.
I’m not sure that I’m confident that he can be paranoided into distraction in the same way that Nixon was. Nixon started to break down, and that’s what allowed people to believe that he was guilty and needed to be removed. With Trump, obviously we can hope, but I think that criminal evidence is going to have to rule the day.
I don’t think that’s impossible, but I think that the NYT values their perceived integrity too much to risk this. I think it’s more likely that it is a screw job, perhaps at the secret behest of the administration, to discredit the LSM when it is revealed to be a “fake”, but even that is less likely than someone actually in the CFSG’s administration.
In my opinion, if the letter is revealed to not be all it seems, it’s most likely the result of the NYT stretching the definition of high ranking official.
That’s similar to a point someone made a while back about Trump’s legal travails.
Trump is different than the average person in many ways, and one of them is that he’s had a very different life history than most people. Predicting how Trump would react to something based on how an normal person would react can be very tricky.
I agree. I would have to recalibrate my entire world-view if it turned out that the NYT fabricated this story. I’m not quite ready to do that.
Here’s a question: Should news sources (other than the NYT, I presume) be busting their butts to uncover who Anonymous is? I say yes. You put the news out there, and you become the news.